Gallery 7: Some Time In New York City 1971-1972

John Lennon and Yoko Ono settled in New York, which Lennon declared the Rome of the day. Following the period of creative seclusion at Tittenhurst Park, they discovered a stimulating artistic and political environment, became friendly with Bob Dylan again, spent time with Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman (the left-leaning leaders of the Youth International Party), got to know members of the Black Panther Party, supported the women’s liberation movement (“Woman is the Nigger of the World”), and played an active role in many political demonstrations. In spring 1972, John Lennon and Yoko Ono went into the studio to record Some Time in New York City, which reflected their commitment to the causes of the far left, as well as addressed the violence in Northern Ireland. When, after months of harassment, US Immigration insistently asked them to leave the country, John Lennon and Yoko Ono came up with the idea of inventing a nation according to the principles set down in “Imagine.” On April 1, 1973, they gave a press conference announcing the creation of NUTOPIA, “a conceptual country” that “has no land, no boundaries, no passports, only people.” NUTOPIA was a country that belonged to everyone; its flag was a simple white handkerchief and the “Nutopian International Anthem,” which appeared on the album Mind Games, consisted of a few seconds of silence. This conceptual country and silent anthem turned the page on the five years that Lennon and Ono’s words and actions in favour of peace had sounded around the world. This new, blank page marked—until its tragically struck down renewal in 1980—the end of the musical and artistic dialogue they had begun in 1968. Following the tumult of what has been called his “lost weekend,” Lennon, at peace with himself, away from the media in the solitude of the Dakota, created a new purpose for his life: to be the man beyond the icon.

“Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans,” sang John Lennon on his last album, Double Fantasy, released after five years of silence in November 1980. One of its songs, “Watching the Wheels,” as he shared with an interviewer, told how “the hardest thing is facing yourself. It’s easier to shout ‘Revolution’ and ‘Power to the People’ than it is to look at yourself and try to find out what’s real inside you and what isn’t, when you’re pulling the wool over your own eyes. That’s the hardest one.” On December 8, 1980, at the age of forty, John Lennon was assassinated at the entrance of his Dakota home.